CHAPTER 11
This was too much, as I found out later. I found myself lying on the sofa in the living room, and my mother, bless her, had put a damp flannel on my forehead.

I felt quite the fainting Victorian heroine, but I believe I was actually in real, clinical shock. My mind was stopped, like an overwound clock. I simply could not see where, or how, I could untangle this twisted mass of snakes, all of which seemed to be eating their own tails.

I then realised Pete was missing.

“Where is he, Mum?”

“He’s outside n the garden, dear. He said he has to think”

“He’s not the only one. Look, I’m back now. I’ll go and get him, you pour some wine, or make some tea, or whatever it is women…”

--adultresses--

“…do”

It wasn’t till I was leaving the room that it struck me. It wasn’t necessarily my mother who had played away. If the poor dead one was brother to both of us, it only meant that we had a parental link, and not necessarily the same one. The patterns…oh, dear god the patterns, the possibilities. The child and I shared a mother, that I knew, but Pete and I did not. So did we share a father? Or was it just Pete and the lost brother who shared that relationship? And if so, which one? Pete senior? My dad John? How? I could obviously work out the ‘when’, biology was easy in that respect, but WHY?

What the fucking hell was going on when we were children? Betrayal? Some odd bloody swinger scene?

Who the hell was I? I had never known ‘what’, but now it was personal as it had never been before.

Mum shook me back to life.

“Go and fetch your friend, dear. You are coming and going tonight, and we do need to set this one to rights, for all of our sakes”

I walked out, the air cool around my calves, grateful for the darkness that hid my shame. Pete was sitting on the bench by our tiny fish pond. I sat down beside him, and almost, it seemed, without thinking he took my hand. We sat there for about ten minutes, neither of us saying anything. Finally Pete drew a long breath.

“You really don’t remember being a kid, do you, Laura?”

“Why do you call me that, Pete?”

“It was what you always demanded, just like the games we played, you were always the beautiful princess. Used to send your dad ballistic if he caught you. But….you always insisted. I had to be the hero, you the damsel.”

He looked at me from the corners of his eyes.

“I suppose should remind you, then. Your favourite story was Sleeping Beauty. You’d lie down in the greenhouse among all the tomato plants. They were your enchanted forest. I had to come and wake you”

I suppose I must have looked completely blank at that point. I mean, what was so important about tomato plants?

“For God’s sake, Lor, what is the main point of her bloody rescue?”

Oh. Oh dear God.

“I had to run one day when your dad came home early, I mean really, really run. You were away from school for a week after that. Then you kept walking into doors, or tripping, or…tell me, have you ever listened to Suzanne Vega?”

“Who is she?”

“’I’ll lend you the CD, a track called ‘Luka’, it might give you some idea”

We sat in silence for a few minutes more, until he squeezed my hand and smiled across at me.

“Come on, let’s get in out of the cold and see if we can’t sort out this festering pile of shit”

I got his arm over my shoulder and with one crutch and my stagger we got him into the living room, where my mother was dabbing her eyes dry. She gave a very wan smile, and after pointing out that it was actually Friday evening, we were all off the next day, she suggested that we have a good attempt at getting seriously drunk.

“Do we need to, Mum?”

“No. However, I would like to. I have several things we need to get straight tonight, and it would help me. There is another reason, Laura. I have noticed that when you are relaxed a little you don’t disappear from this world so much. You have left us three times to my certain knowledge tonight, and it hurts me beyond belief to see you like that and so I would prefer you to join me in a drink or seven”

She sat silent for a while, and then added in a small voice “And I won’t be able to say what I need unless I am very, very relaxed”

She already had the bottles and glasses out, and we ended up on the sofa together, her nestled between me and Pete. After a couple of large swigs, she began.

“Laura, your dad was a charming man. I was a big thing for him, though, and we marred when I was quite young. I was rather a catch, you know? A local beauty, I say in my pride”

She was right. My mother’s pictures showed a stunningly beautiful young girl, a real 1960s fashion plate, all Mary Quant, big eyes and pale lips. She had been quite a looker, and as she explained it Dad had courted her with the big guns. A successful local builder, he had buried her under flowers and sweet words, and she had swooned like the heroine of one of the romantic bodice-rippers she had loved to read.

And they had married, and realty had come home to roost. He drank, not as we were doing, but thirstily, hungrily, even, as that word seems better to reflect his need for alcohol. It seems I had been an accident, after Mum had given up on the hope of a child.

“And you were there, and I had real hopes for us, the three of us. I thought, surely he will settle, surely he will heal, but, no. When you were born, though, he tried, he really seemed to, he had a man to follow him, and then he realised you weren’t what you should have been, what he thought you should have been…..

“Then, the drinking brought the diabetes, and he was even angrier because he had had limits placed on him, and that did not happen to John Prentice Evans, no it did not, and things came to a head when somebody dared to burgle us. How very dare they, didn’t they know who he was….

“And when I said ‘yes, they probably did, it’s why they picked this house’, he ht me yet again and told me to deal with the police and the insurance because that was all I was good for.”

I pulled my mum to me and held her as tight as I could for a while, and felt Pete’s arms go round us both. After a minute she pushed me away, and stood up. She moved over by the fireplace, pacing slowly. Pete took my hand again.

“You see, Peter, that is when I met your dad, when he came round to do the crime report. That is why I call you Peter, because Pete, my Pete, will always be your father to me. Your mother was so obsessed with her little shop she had even taken to spending nights over it, and he was lonely, and I was hurt….”

There was another long silence, and I felt Pete interlace his fingers with mine. I Also felt him trembling again and so I gave his hand a squeeze to let him know, and I kept pouring the wine down.

“And his smile was so sweet, and he was so gentle, and so lonely…”

And suddenly she was six months gone, and married to a man who hadn’t got it up in a couple of years, and when she couldn’t conceal it any more he had, as so often before, taken matters into his own two fists, and I had spent an extra holiday with Aunty Hannah and a big man had kept his pride but gained more suspicions.

And I had continued to trip on the stairs, or walk into doors, or fall off my little bike while things fell out of cupboards onto my mother.

But a princess in her mother’s old shorty nighty still managed to get rescued by her knight, and Sleeping Beauty was awakened day after day, in the traditional way.

With a kiss.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCXnJIAQd1o